Correction

Oops. I was way off in my "Alternate History" post, and probably in other posts about the doomed project as well.

Today in a meeting people referred to another requirement mentioned in the Congressional mandate that I hadn't thought of when I wrote Thursday's post. After hearing that, I dug out the actual mandate and read it. I had thought it only mentioned the size limit, but no, it clearly says a lot more than that. It says that we have to ensure the safety of individuals and the environment and specifically mentions certain staffing requirements. So I have to reevaluate that gray area. It's not as big as I thought, and it starts within the mandate. I thought a lot of the stuff in the rule was scope creep, but we really are required to do a lot of it. Which is kind of funny, because the meeting today began with H. complaining about scope creep and at the time I was thinking to myself "Of course it's scope creep. Limit this project to the mandatory size limit change and closing the standards loophole and it would be 30 pages, published six months ago. Oh, the mandate also mentioned staffing? Huh, I wonder what else it mentioned? OK, with staffing maybe it would be 50 or, hell, even 100 pages, published three months ago. The remaining 200-plus pages of the document and ongoing work is all scope creep."

That's obviously not the kind of thing anyone could say out loud, let alone me, but all these meetings about putting in just one more part or changing just one more thing get aggravating. But the staffing was brought up in the meeting, and that made me wonder just what else exactly fell under the mandate that I don't normally think of, and so I actually looked it up, and, wow, the mandate is actually fairly broad. And to be clear, there really is quite a bit of scope creep. Anything that's not truly essential for safety, rather than just being kind of nice, is scope creep. Anything that applies to things below the former size limit is scope creep, especially anything that only applies to things below the former size limit. Anything related to cross-platform compatibility is scope creep (I think). It's just that lots of stuff that I thought was scope creep probably isn't, and it's objectively harder to tell what is.

So anyways, what does all this mean? That the idea of meeting the deadline was always crazy to begin with.